Poetry Debates IV: “Poetry After Nature” – A Review

8 May 2025

Photo: Benedikt Stamm

Urgent poetic and political questions about humans’ relationship to the more-than-human environment were the focus of the fourth and final Poetry Debates series, entitled “Poetry after Nature.” During three public evening events* poets, performers, and literary scholars came together to discuss the potential of poetry in increasingly ecologically crisis-ridden times. The events addressed some of the current poetological, cultural, and social debates taking place, such as the tension between art and activism. This debate series was conceptualized and curated by Antje Schmidt in collaboration with Claudia Benthien.

At the first event, held at Warburg-Haus in Hamburg, we inquired into the state of the nature poem in an age when the concept of “nature” is being emphatically farewelled. Literary scholar Cornelia Zumbusch gave a short lecture on the tradition and current situation of the nature poem against the backdrop of theoretical debates on the (supposed) end of nature. She also made reference to the other guest of the evening, poet Carla Cerda, who then read from her poetry collections Loops (2020) and Ausgleichsflächen (2023). These volumes deal with global and local interdependencies between ecology and technology and also unfurl their enormous complexity – “like browser tabs” on a screen – in a poetically sophisticated way. The subsequent debate, which was moderated by Antje Schmidt, focused on the influence that specific digital working methods and research techniques have on our relationship to the environment, as well as questions of human responsibility – especially in light of the large-scale technological interventions being made into planetary ecologies. According to Carla Cerda, poetry has the task of making the processuality and historical evolution of “nature” tangible.

The second debate event, which took place in cooperation with Das Lyrische Foyer, was hosted by the Kunstklinik Eppendorf. Cultural and literary scholar Sophie Witt and poet Rike Scheffler discussed “Climate Fiction in Poetry”. The evening was moderated by PoetryDA Fellow Eckhard Schumacher. The reading, the lecture, and the discussion revolved around the question of contemporary multimodal poetry as an “archive of possible futures.” In her lecture performance, Rike Scheffler first combined a reading from her poetry collection Lava.Rituale (2023) with the screening of an art film that is part of the multimodal work cosmos of the same name. Sophie Witt then discussed climate fiction as an eco-futurist genre in her presentation and addressed poetry’s license to experiment more radically with anthropocentric genre conventions than prose, for example. During the panel and audience discussion, the focus was often on questions of what “to do” (the title of one of Scheffler’s poems) in the face of the climate catastrophe. Scheffler explained that her poetry is about trying out new linguistic realities and forms of action that can have an effect on current modes of being.

The third and thus final Poetry Debate, and thus the last, was dedicated to “Poetry as an Activist Practice” and took place at Thalia Theater’s Nachtasyl. After an introduction by the moderator of the evening, Claudia Benthien, who emphasized the traditional connection between spoken word and activism, literary scholar Frieder von Ammon presented a short lecture on the history of poetry as a political and activist practice. Making reference to historical genres such as the workers' song, he argued that the literary distinction between supposedly autonomous art poetry and activist forms of use creates a false dichotomy. Lyrical forms, he said, have always had the potential to influence the recipient’s consciousness. Poet and philosopher Samuel Kramer performed spoken word texts and poems related to the topic of the evening. Panel participants then discussed the specific effect of performed poetry, where political content is embodied by a poet, and the uses and functions of activist poetry, such as the creation of community. Kramer said that the distribution of his own resources – between art and other forms of activism – posed a particular challenge, but emphasized poetry’s role as one part of a collective practice of climate activism.

We would like to thank all our partners, guests, and audience members for this stimulating series of debates. Links to the video recordings of the events can be found in the audio and video material section.

* Unfortunately, Poetry Debate IV.III, which was rescheduled for April 2025, had to be cancelled for organizational reasons.